Ashish’s World!

Sramana Mitra informed me by via email that she is doing a series called Investment Thesis, with interviews of various VCs and what they are looking to invest in. She says - I will do what I can to profile venture firms that are focused particularly on seed / early-stage deals, as I find it disturbing how the VCs are continually moving away from seed deals, leaving a chasm which will create a big problem in the upcoming years.

She has profiled 3 VCs so far:

Sumir Chadha from Sequoia Capital, who is actively investing in seed and early stage ventures in India

Sumir: I have spent the past decade between Sequoia Capital india and Goldman Sachs investing in early to mid-stage Indian companies spanning a number of industries including consumer internet, wireless, outsourced services and software. Prior to that, I was at Mckinsey working on internet and technology strategies. I have an MBA and was a Computer Science major at Princeton. More…

George Zachary from Charles River Ventures, who is focused 50/50 on seed and Series A investments

George: I’ve been involved in technology - either operationally or as a venture capitalist for over 20 years. I am one of the few venture capitalists that has played both in consumer entertainment from leading the Nintendo64 development business to being on the board of a movie production company to being a co-founder and co-investor in a consumer web service, Shutterfly. More…

Alex Osadzinski from Trinity Ventures, who is primarily focused on investing in the first or second institutional round. They also look at a few seed deals, where the team and/or the space is well-known to them

Alex: My background is mostly on the operational and entrepreneurial side. I spent 22 years in operational roles, at 6 startups, one behemoth, and one turnaround. My roles were always a combination of VP Engineering, VP Marketing and VP Sales, or CEO/President. Of the startups, two were sold, three went public with multi-billion dollar outcomes, and one is a gently smoking crater. I’ve been at Trinity for just over five years, working across all of our practices, but with a personal focus on software and digital media. More…

Sramana - it might be better to tag it with a unique keyword that will return only the posts on the Investment Thesis. This way, people can bookmark just one link which returns all the relevant posts rather than individual links.